The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Comparative Essay

In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” the story takes place in a community full of carefree people. The story starts off in a festival, a time of celebration. The reader can see that the people do enjoy themselves as the story describes “merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets, the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance.” (Guin 1) People all over the town are making merry and having a pleasant time. It also takes place in the summer, which could have some light-hearted meanings as Flora Richards-Gustafson explains in Examples of Seasonal Symbolism “When a writer refers to the summer, she may refer to the prime of her own or a character’s

Both tales start off with pleasant words but start to use more brutish language the further into the story they go. The narrator in “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” describes the scene in colorful words. It sets the scene as “The silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.” (Guin 1) using pleasant words like “cheerful faint sweetness” and “joyous clanging”. However, the more the reader goes into the story, the more they see in the tale. The narrator starts to use more brutish and sad words to describe things in tale. An example of this is when the narrator says “A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar” (Guin 3) They use words like “little light seeps” and “cellar” which is a very sad picture compared to the green fields and colorful houses discussed in the beginning of the story. The tone ultimately goes from cheery and full of life to sorrowful and